Labour’s lost voters clamour for belonging – but will the party answer them?
In the wake of Labour’s terrible, soul-destroying election defeat in 2019, the need to “listen” to the red wall constituency voters who had deserted the party became an instant truism. In the trauma of the moment, there was a genuine desire to understand why so many of the places that had sustained the labour movement for so long had voted for the enemy.
But the ability to listen well is a rare and difficult skill. The great German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who devoted his intellectual career to the art of understanding what others mean, defined it beautifully. The good listener, said Gadamer, “does not go about identifying the weaknesses of what another person says in order to prove that one is always right, but one seeks instead, as far as possible, to strengthen the other’s viewpoint so that what the other person has to say becomes illuminating”.
As the first electoral test of Keir Starmer’s leadership approaches this week, how much of that kind of listening can truly be said to have taken place? Labour may yet hold on to Hartlepool in a byelection freighted with red wall symbolism, though the polls do not look good. The electoral windfall of Tory sleaze stories may help shore up the vote in local elections, but a weekend YouGov poll predicting a nine-point northern swing to the Tories is cause for trepidation. A year and a half on from that dramatic December night, the Tories still have more reason than Labour to be optimistic about their prospects in nonmetropolitan England. What is it that the left is not hearing?
There were clues in a recent report by UK in a Changing Europe, titled Comfortable Leavers, which analysed the views of relatively prosperous Brexit voters. The study highlighted the way that a shared pride in Britain – its national identity, public services and industry – held together a coalition stretching from the comfortable shires to the red wall Labour-voting towns. A “nostalgic optimism” about Britishness united well-off Tories who moaned about the workshy working class with the type of blue-collar workers the Labour party was founded to represent.
The collapse of the red wall in 2019 was confirmation of the potency of this cultural alliance, which has not disintegrated now Brexit is “done”. Engaging with it is fundamental if Labour is to progress beyond its city and university town redoubts. Valuing forms of belonging that absorb the individual into something greater than themselves, the nostalgic optimists are united by a desire for a politics that has large horizons. But rather than seek “illumination” and insight, many sections of the left have reverted to instinctive disdain and distrust.
When a leaked Labour strategy presentation ham-fistedly sought to prioritise “the use of the [union] flag, veterans, dressing smartly”, it was disproportionately monstered by critics who see pride in Britishness as the gateway to xenophobic nationalism. The relevance of the class dimension of the red wall defection from Labour has been hotly contested: why should the opinions of a young Deliveroo rider in London be considered less authentically working class than those of a retired blue-collar worker in Leigh? Why should Labour privilege the patriotism of a homeowning social conservative in their 50s over the cosmopolitan liberalism of an urban, renting and indebted thirtysomething?
This championing of those who did